Art exhibit: The Emergency Biennale of Chechnya

An exhibition of the Emergency Biennale of Chechnya is one of two public projects the GCF is producing for the WSF in San Francisco. The exhibition will open on January 25th at the California College of the Arts, Playspace gallery.

Here is a description of the exhibit from its curator, Evelyne Jouanno:

Recent historical events reveal how much the dominant system is the generator of conflicts, hate, violence, inequality, racism, exploitation, and destruction. In the context of “ambivalent globalisation”, human and social emergencies cannot be anymore the domain of “others”. If the challenge of multiculturalism is to offere new alternative models of social organization, more open to real coexistence and exchange of cultures and human values, how do we turn these concepts/discourses into reality? How to attract public attention and stimulate a more ample debate on controversial social and political topics, easily ignored and forgotten realities, countries that do not have visibility for historic reasons and peoples who have been deprived of territories and identities? What kind of new strategies must be developed to carry out this responsibility beyond the existing institutions and market places and their political/financial constraints?

It is in this perspective that I would like to introduce Emergency Biennale in Chechnya which has been conceived and organized as an echo to the 1st Moscow Biennial as well as a reaction against a particular background of destruction of a people, a culture, an identity.

Wishing to reintroduce Chechnya into international discourse while questioning the phenomenon and proliferation of international Biennials, Emergency Biennale in Chechnya opened on 23 February 2005 in Grozny, in different locations in the city, and in Paris at the Palais de Tokyo. More than sixty international artists, established and emerging, accepted to provide a work and its duplicate created to fit into suitcases shipped to Chechnya and different other cities in the world for mirror exhibitions: after Paris, the touring part moved to Brussels, Bolzano, Milan, Riga, Tallinn, Vancouver, in a laboratory form to Puebla, Mexico, and to the most recent stop at the Istanbul Biennial in 2007. For each step of the traveling part of the project, new artists are invited, conferences are organized, and additional suitcases are readied to be sent to Chechnya.

The travelling part of the exhibition will end in Grozny with the meeting of the artworks and their twins. The collection will then become the foundation for a museum.

www.emergency-biennale.org